SEO in Vidyard: an overview

Search Engine Optimization or SEO can be defined as the process to increase the online visibility of web pages within search engine results, generated by providers such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

There are 4 key areas, relative to improving SEO with Vidyard. These are SEO Metatags, Sitemaps, Hubs and Sharing Pages.

To receive the most page visits, you will want to see relevant video content as high as possible in the search engine results. Achieving this isn’t as straightforward as a page with text.

This is because search engines cannot watch your videos when crawling web pages for content to index. Therefore, adding contextual information about your videos in a format that can be read by a crawler, will enable the video to be located via the search engine being used.

SEO Metatags

When the SEO metatags feature is switched on, all your current and future embed codes will gather the information about your player’s content and inject it into the <head> section of the webpage where the players live. This is in a web (schema.org) compliant format called JSON-LD, used to structure the video metadata and is recognized by the crawlers. This metadata is not seen on your webpage unless you enter the browser’s developer tools, so it won’t clutter up the page or decrease load times.

There are a number of metadata fields within the JSON-LD object, but the ones that you may wish to adjust are the name, description and tags – tags are listed as keywords. These are all set at the player level. The transcript is the only one that is delivered from the individual video level.

You will find that automatic English transcripts are available on each video – you’ll just need to publish these in order to take effect for SEO Metatags.

Summary

Turning SEO Metatags on from within the Feature Store is a simple way to increase the visibility of your videos to a search engine web crawler.

That being said, you do need to rely on the web crawlers to reach the pages to index the content, which can take time on large websites and the results that you wish for cannot always be guaranteed.

Although SEO Metatags can be enough to get your video listed in Search Engine Results Pages, it’s recommended to support this with a Video Sitemap.

Video Sitemap

If you have many pages on your domain, and only some that contain Vidyard Players, it is important that search engines are able to recognise this for efficient and effective indexing.

In order to tell a search engine about this information, you can provide a list of all of your videos and pages where they are located via a sitemap. Within this sitemap is metadata from the videos, such as the title, description and tags. This is automatically constructed by Vidyard and placed online into an XML file.

How to create a Sitemap

Place all of your Vidyard Players onto your website.

You or your web admin, must copy and paste the XML link from the Sitemap page into your robots text file. This is a file that search engines first check to find out what pages they should and should not be crawling when indexing.

Once the link is in place, Vidyard will verify your robots text file and then offer the ability to add locations and players. This automatically builds the crawlable data that is stored in the XML file, without the need to add code manually.

Summary

Combining SEO Metatags and Sitemaps for content on your own domain will ensure that search engines can locate all of your video content and index it in the most effective way possible.

Video Hubs

As a default, any new hubs are not enabled for Search Engine indexing.

Having Search Engine indexing disabled will ensure that a hub with company confidential videos will not be listed on Google during the setup process.

This setting can be changed in the Design tab of the Hub under Features. This will add or remove the XML sitemap in the robots.txt file that Vidyard generates automatically on the hub’s subdomain.

Sharing Pages

You have the ability to enable search engine indexing via the settings tab in the Sharing Page settings.

When this switch is disabled, additional ‘noindex’ metadata will be added to the head of your sharing pages. This will tell any web crawlers that come onto one of your sharing pages that you do not wish for it to be indexed.

This can be useful if you only wish for indexing to take place on your main website. It can be possible that a web crawler could index your sharing pages if another page contains a link to them. Keeping it disabled will help prevent that from happening if you so wish.